So are these cropped, or are they multiple shots that have been stitched together?

ThanksJames

All of the landscape panos I do are stitched together from multiple panned shots. For wildlife shots it is usually pretty difficult to get multiple shots to stitch smoothly because of movement of the subject. In addition to stitching multiple images together, I consider a "pano" to be a format choice for an individual image that gives a much longer horizontal width than vertical height, like the one today.

All things come to an end. I'm off on a short trip for a few days and this seems like a good time to bring this thread to an end. Thank you to everyone who viewed my work and for all the feedback. I thought I would end this where I started, Zabriske Pt in Death Valley.

As anybody knows that tries to do these types of moon shots, the moon is usually so much brighter than the landscape at night, it always washes out when you expose for the landscape. For these types of shots I do what I call a moon specific HDR. I shoot the same shot first exposing for the night time landscape and then another exposure for the moon. To tell the truth, I do usually zoom in for the moon shot just because in a wide format like a pano the moon is just too small. At processing I specifically drop the moon in over the washed out moon. I think this works well because there is always a little bit of aurora around the moon and if you just drop a moon in it looks fake without the aurora. The mistake I think people often make is to drop in a perfectly exposed moon which just looks phony to me. I drop in an overexposed moon that retains just enough detail.

BTW - There is one very special time when there is a full moon when moonset and sunrise occur almost simultaneous. This is truly a magic window in which the moon and landscape can be very close in light levels. I was hoping for that when I took this image, but unfortunately the two events missed each other by 20 minutes and I had to resort some HDR compensation.